The Arabic word for fasting is ‘sawm’. The literal meaning of sawm is to abstain. During the month of fasting, a person refrains from many things. Thus Ramadan is a month of leading a controlled life. Keeping oneself in discipline is very important. Success is for one who knows the art of discipline. One who lacks discipline cannot achieve big success. The month of Ramadan is meant as training in discipline. Discipline is important both in worldly and religious aspects of life.

The Quran says: “With every hardship, there is ease.” (94:5) This verse was revealed at a time when Muslims had to go through many difficulties in Makkah. At that time, the believers had developed complaints, as they were being afflicted with hardship. This is why the above verse was revealed. Here God is saying that He has made the world in such a way that it is not possible that a difficulty would be present without ease. Ease is always present along with a difficulty. Therefore one should keep patience and try to resolve the matter. The Prophet said that a believer relies on patience. This means that in difficult situations, we should keep patience. When we face a problem, we should not try to eliminate the problem itself, rather we should patiently try to resolve the issue.

Why is patience so important? The first essential step in life is to find a right starting point. For example, to educate your children, you have to begin with nursery school; you cannot start with making them study MBBS. For every aspect of life, we ought to know from where we should begin. To discover this right beginning, we need to have patience. Without the virtue of patience, we will be unable to understand the right starting point for ourselves.